I’ve previously observed that few historians are military historians and so some basic questions about wars tend to go unanswered. However, I have found a book that fills in much of the gap.
Years ago, a critic challenged William McNeil’s magnum opus, The Rise of the West, [1] by saying that his book lacked military analysis—it “lost track of the interaction between military technology and political patterns.” So McNeill wrote a book about just that subject, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. [2]
I’d like to share two items from his book. One is astounding, but perhaps true. The other addresses the frequently asked questions, “Why did Europe go to War in 1914 and why did the war last so long?”
The astounding one starts with McNeill’s description of Europe in the year 1000 as “a war-like, violence-prone society.” Why? “Habits of bloodshed were deep-seated, perennially fed by the fact that Europeans raised both pigs and cattle in considerable numbers but had to slaughter all but a small breeding stock each autumn for lack of sufficient winter fodder.” Since such bloodshed became “routine,” it “may have had a good deal to do with [Europeans’] remarkable readiness to shed human blood and think nothing of it.”[3]
I will let that settle in without comment, except to say it is a bizarre idea but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility; a visit to a modern Spanish bullfight would strengthen its credibility.
Now to the perplexing and perennial questions of why World War I began and why it lasted so long. With hindsight, McNeill says, we can see that while the war was an “Armageddon” of sorts, wiping out an entire social culture, it was followed by an even more horrendous war—indicating that it was not a unique catastrophic event. [4] There must be underlying causes beyond short-term explanations such as the system of treaties that compelled countries to support their allies .
McNeill offers three contributing causes. The first is traditional “balance of power” politics. [5] Europe has consistently gone to war when one country or power (for example, Austria in 1618, France in 1793) appears to be gaining too much power. Germany’s swift ascendance motivated other nations to try to control it in 1914.
The second is demographics. McNeill argues that Europe experienced rising population in the second half of the nineteenth century, reflecting reduction in disease and adequate food. That was good, at first. But by the 1880s, there was turmoil and dissatisfaction in “nearly all European villages situated between the Rhine and Don.” [6] Industrialization lagged and young people didn’t have jobs. This led to a surge in emigration and to rising revolutionary sentiment. The Balkans in particular became a “powder keg,” one that blew up. [7]
The third factor may be the most important. McNeill calls it “managerial metamorphosis”—how the war was carried out. Each country’s institutional structures joined together as if into a “national firm.” Once it was clear that Germany and France would be in the trenches for years, “the belligerents were impelled to improvise means to sustain the rival armies, month after month, feeding, equipping, supplying, training, healing, and burying men literally by the millions.” [8]
Each country had its own way of conducting all-out war, but the process had to solve multiple problems on a scale never tried before, from making nitrate out of nitrogen (Germany built factories to do this) to importing raw materials (France imported food from Britain and the United States so it could focus on manufacturing arms).
This “managerial metamorphosis” created a momentum that prolonged the war. As long as countries could keep going, they did. It also involved business deeply with government, creating a military-industrial complex (in Dwight Eisenhower’s words) that in some respects hasn’t disappeared.
[1]William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago, [1963] 1991).
[2] McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
[3] McNeill 1982, 64.
[4] McNeill 1982, 308.
[5] McNeill 1982, 308.
[6] McNeill 1982, 310.
[7] McNeill 1982, 314.
[8] McNeill 1982, 317-318.
If the willingness to shed blood has a big root in the slaughter of animals for food, what country with 4 seasons didn’t do this? I suggest a more plausible force.
1. Killing one’s own species usually requires a dehumanization process–or at least assigning the enemy to a lower order of the species not worthy of the right to life.
2. Most of the world’s societies until very recently had very well defined class and caste systems, so that lower classes were in practice considered less worthy of rights.
3. Most of the fighting and dying was done by men of the lower classes. Until a few centuries ago upper class warriors were often wanted alive for hostages and ransom. Consider Chinese human wave attacks in the Korean war and Japanese fight and die of WWII.
Only as warfare began to involve the growing middle classes did the volunteer military become preferable. Proscription for service for Vietnam largely enabled the US to adopt voluntary service. (Even then, many affluent families found ways to keep their sons out of the draft.)